So, somewhere in the middle of the night (at least for me) Samsung and Google held a joint event, in which they announced both the new Nexus phone, the Galaxy Nexus, and Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. While the Galaxy Nexus is a pretty impressive phone, what we got to see from Ice Cream Sandwich surely didn't drop too many jaws.

Every time I use iMac I feel the fonts are not clear and as cryspy, they are bit blur as compared to my Ubuntu/Kubuntu laptop. On Windows fonts look good too. Ubuntu fonts look super cryspy and good. I have failed to understand why iMac fonts don't look that good, specially when Mac fonts and mac desktop is so popular and why nobody complains about it.

Here's the trick : OS X just positions characters like in a written text, without caring about the characteristics of the underlying screen. Since computer screens have a finite resolution, this results in many details of the font falling between two pixels, and thus being rendered as blur.

On Windows and some Linux distro, on the other hand, text is rendered so that every boundary of the font falls on a pixel boundary. Thus, there is no blur, and everything feels more crisp. As a counterpart, the rendering deviates a bit from the original.

If you are used to one of these ways of rendering text, you'll think that it looks fine and that the other that looks awful. In reality, it's only a matter of design choices : do you want text on a screen to be as close to the original as possible (which the strong DTP community of the Mac will probably agree with, even though the difference is almost negligible in the end) ? Or do you want it to look crisp and well-defined ?

Your view is a bit black and white. While Mac OS stay more true to original font shapes than Windows, it’s not like the they disregards the pixel grid completely either.

It is also worth mentioning that Mac is much more able to render fonts without extra hinting information much much better than Windows. Windows fonts also tend to look bad at big sizes (they tend to look pixelated at bigger sizes).

The new font technology in Windows 7 and forward (used in IE9) seem to combine the best of both worlds, following the pixel-grid fairly strictly at small sizes and being allowing for more “blurry” rendering at big sizes to make it look smooth.